Centre for Multiliteracies co-hosts upcoming talk

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Centre for Multiliteracies co-hosts upcoming talk

Published on August 15 2014

The Centre for Multiliteracies and the Social Justice Research Institute will be co-hosting Dr. Sue Nichols from the University of South Australia and her presentation: "Tribal tales and suburban stories: racialized depictions of literacy events in children's picture books"

When: September 8, 2014 - 4-6 p.m.

Where: WC 251

About the talk:

The practice of reading to children in the early years is widely understood to be beneficial for children’s literacy development. Despite technological changes, traditional picture books remain the most popular type of shared text. However, there has been surprisingly little attention to how the subject ‘reading to children’ is portrayed in texts designed to be read to children.

Scenes of reading and storytelling appear not infrequently in children's picture books. These depictions communicate messages about the kinds of people who read, the kinds of places in which literacy events take place and the kinds of texts which are shared. Importantly, they can also signal who are excluded, raising the issue of how such exclusions may impact on young members of excluded groups. In this talk I will share findings from a project which analysed a corpus of 100 children’s picture books sourced from a community library.

There are serious implications for parents, teachers, teacher educators, literacy researchers and community literacy workers.

About Dr. Sue Nichols:

Sue Nichols is a literacy researcher and director of the Multiliteracies and Global Englishes Research Group at the University of South Australia. A teacher educator, she coordinates undergraduate and postgraduate courses in literacy and English teaching. Sue has authored numerous book chapters and journal articles as well as the book Resourcing Early Learners: New networks, new players (Routledge 2012). A forthcoming edited book is Languages and Literacies as Mobile and Placed Resources (Routledge 2015).